Abstract

GRIPPALDI, Esteban. «Why me?»: narratives of the origin of depression in users of mental health services. Cuad. Fac. Humanid. Cienc. Soc., Univ. Nac. Jujuy [online]. 2021, n.60, pp.239-267. ISSN 1668-8104.

Depression currently represents the most frequent diagnosis in mental health, however little is known about the perspectives of those who suffer from it. This article analyses from a sociological point of view the biographical narratives of the origin of depression in users of mental health services in the city of Santa Fe, Argentina. Inquire from life stories in the available discursive repertoires to make sense of the discomfort: What kind of stories about the origin of depression do they elaborate? Do they resort to more biomedical, psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic or more political and rebellious discourses? From the perspectives of those who experience it: Is depression independent of external conditions or is it the product of lived events? Based on these questions, the article presents the results of an investigation focused on the use of the biographical method based on the analysis of forty-two in-depth interviews carried out with people who self-perceive suffering from depression and participate in different spaces therapeutic. The article describes, in dialogue with the results of other research, a multiplicity of ways to narrate the beginning of depression. Construct six types of narratives, two focused on the application of internalist explanatory keys, two externalist and two intermediate. These ways of making sense of the experience of depression locate the origin within the individual, in disturbing external events of identity and in an articulation of external and subjective conditions. In this social pathology of individuality, explanations are circumscribed to the private universe, centrally to the family nucleus. He concludes that beyond the diversity of narrative styles of causes, in these subjectivities there is a depoliticization of the origin of depression that leads to a privatization of the suffering experience

Keywords : Depression; Narratives; Mental health; Subjectivities; Users.